“Gunning For A Fight”: Trump Announced New Tariffs Without Review By White House Lawyers, Staff

by the functionaries at HotAir:

“A nice complement to the last post, about POTUS’s deteriorating mood. The conventional wisdom in the media over the past 24 hours is that Trump’s growing misery and “isolation” is leading him to behave more erratically, from erupting at Jeff Sessions on Twitter to that bizarro-world performance at the White House gun-control summit to the shocking announcement yesterday of new global tariffs on steel and aluminum. None of those positions are new to him; he’s been a protectionist, for instance, for his entire adult life. But the headaches from John Kelly, Rob Porter, Bob Mueller, Sessions, Jared and Ivanka, and the NRA may have put him in more of a YOLO mindset towards his job.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing if you’re a Trump fan. If you want to see him smash establishment shibboleths like free trade, he’ll never be more likely to do it than when he’s in a grim “f*** everything” zone like this one. But you can be a populist without being a *reckless* populist. According to NBC, yesterday’s announcement was recklessly made:…….Please continue reading below:

Orange County’s Largest Homeless Camp Cleared Out

by JOHN SEXTON at HotAir:

Last September I wrote about a homeless camp which had grown up along the bike path which stretches along the Santa Ana River in Orange County, California. Residents in the area complained about trash, human waste, and crime. People living in the camps were constantly in fear of violence from those nearby, many of whom have substance abuse or mental health problems. Last week, after a lengthy legal battle involving the ACLU, a judge ruled that Orange County could begin to clear out the camps so long as people were given a place to go. Fox News reports:

Trash trucks and contractors in hazmat gear have descended on the camp and so far removed 250 tons of trash, 1,100 pounds of human waste and 5,000 hypodermic needles.

But the effort hasn’t been without controversy as homeless advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union and a federal judge have all weighed in on the fate of some-700 people evicted from their home along the Santa Ana River — next to Angel Stadium of Anaheim and a few miles from Disneyland, outside Los Angeles.

Spitzer, whose district includes the encampment, has battled the advocates since last fall when the decision was first made to close the camp. The ACLU and others filed a federal civil rights lawsuit to stop this and several stays have ensued until last week, when the final go-ahead was granted.

For those being evicted, a mediation with U.S. District Court Judge David Carter offered the choice of a bed in a shelter or a month-long motel voucher; medical aid; drug treatment; job training; storage for their belongings and housing for pets at the county animal shelter.

So far, 544 people have been moved to shelters and motel rooms and approximately 100 remain at the riverbed. Crews counted 207 tents, but it is unclear if they are occupied.

The LA Times reported the offer of free vouchers for motels and food attracted people from other areas who were looking for a handout:

As word spread about motel vouchers, homeless people from different parts of Southern California began streaming in, trying to get their names on a waiting list.

“We know there are new faces and they’re exploiting the goodness of the county. But we know who’s been here because we have inventory,” said County Supervisor Todd Spitzer.

County Chief Executive Frank Kim said county workers are familiar with the people who have called the riverbed home. But that hasn’t stopped new people from arriving, he said.

“Just yesterday, I was out here and people would open up their cars and a bunch of other people would step out with their sleeping bags, looking for a motel voucher,” Kim said. “We want to be clear that vouchers are being offered only to the riverbed residents. But we will work with all the homeless to help connect them to other services they need.”

But for the people who had been living in the camp, this seems to have been a positive step. As I pointed out last year, there are reports of fights and even rapes taking place at this camp. Drug dealers, who move in to profit from the people with substance abuse problems, discourage anyone calling the police so most crimes aren’t reported.

Alice Simpson, 57, originally from Alabama, said she was “thrilled to get into safety.” She stood in the shade of a tree, counting down the minutes until transportation arrived to take her to the Bridges at Kraemer Place, a county-run shelter in Anaheim.

“I’m very comfortable with this move and I want to go in without fear,” said Simpson, who has been diagnosed with symptoms associated with schizophrenia. “I have been living in fear at this camp and the person I call my best friend is 911. Maybe that will change now.”

Now the people who live near this camp won’t have to deal with the problems it creates and the bike path can become a community asset for recreation again. The problem, of course, is that all of this is going to cost money. There are an estimated 5,000 homeless people in Orange County, but that’s a fraction of the number in nearby areas, including Los Angeles. This effort to deal with a problem has now created a cleared out campsite along the river which hundreds of homeless people from LA could descend on and inhabit.

Judge David Carter, who approved clearing the camp, stood nearby while it was being cleared. There was no violence and no arrests were made, at least so far. As this CBS 2 report makes clear, police will be revisiting the site for several weeks, encouraging people to accept help or move on. Eventually, if that fails to work, they will arrest those who remain behind or those who show up to take their place. In the long run, that’s going to be the only way to keep this area clear, i.e. enforce the law against camping there.

THE SCHIFF MEMO’S APPALLING DISHONESTY

by Scott Johnson at PowerLine:

Over the weekend the House Intelligence Committee Democrats’ much ballyhooed memorandum (“the Schiff memo”) was finally redacted and released. I posted the Schiff memo here and Devin Nunes’s response here.

The 10-page Schiff memo defends the FBI against the charge that it abused its surveillance powers during the 2016 election. The redactions strongly suggest that the Democrats don’t care as much about protecting intelligence sources and methods as they do about keeping up the appearance that there must be a pony in here somewhere.

The Democrats’ mainstream media adjunct has of course seized on the release of the memo to regurgitate the obligatory talking points. Read properly, however, the Schiff memo undermines the Democrats’ case. Andrew McCarthy authoritatively explicates the memo in his invaluable NR column “The Schiff memo harms Democrats more than it helps them,” just posted yesterday evening.

Unlike the Democrats’ faithful media servants, McCarthy applies relevant professional expertise to understanding the memo; he knows what he is talking about. Unlike the Democrats and their media servants, he does not live to promote a party line. He is a natural teacher.

Exposing the Deep Rot in the Deep State

by Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

Once again, the president has pried behind the stucco of the Deep State’s institutional edifice and shown that the pillars are termite-ridden. Over at Instapundit, law professor Glenn Reynolds said it most succinctly:

Trump’s luck is pretty amazing. The entire media sets up a week-long hatefest aimed at the NRA, culminating in that shameful fake “Town Hall,” and then the very next day it comes out that there was a police officer there who was too cowardly to do anything, and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who was shaming and lecturing gun owners the night before, must have known it while he was up there on stage.

Trump’s superpower is his ability, just by existing, to bring out the deep and pervasive rot in America’s institutions and the people who run them.

In fact, there were four armed deputies at the Parkland, Florida high school, none of whom entered to intervene when the shooting occurred. Heroes like the JROTC students and the coach gave up their lives to protect others, while four armed cops did nothing to end the carnage. At least one witness said he saw the first deputy (Scot Peterson), who has since resigned, hiding behind a stairwell in a separate building while talking on his phone during the four to six minutes the shootings occurred, and it is likely he was talking to his superiors at the time. It defies belief that four deputies at the scene did nothing and that their headquarters were not informed and fully aware that the men were not going in to help.

After Columbine, the FBI training and tactical advice to local law enforcement officials was not to wait for a SWAT or tactical team to show up, but to immediately engage and disarm the shooter. On Facebook, Philip Smith notes, citing various FBI planning guides:

Lessons learned from this tragedy included the need for all police officers to be properly trained, equipped and empowered to immediately intervene in an active shooter situation to stop the ongoing violence regardless of their assignment.

Modern day law enforcement training and tactics dictate that the primary objective of the first law enforcement officer(s) on the scene of an active shooter situation is to locate and stop the person or persons believed to be the shooter(s). As law enforcement active shooter training has evolved, there has been a move away from waiting for several officers to arrive and form a “team” prior to searching for the shooter.

Today, many agencies and trainers recommend a solo officer entry into an active shooter situation if it is believed the officer on scene can locate, isolate and/or stop the shooter prior to other arriving law enforcement officers. The solo officer entry can be a very dangerous response strategy. However, properly trained and equipped police officers acting alone without the benefit of backup have stopped ongoing active shooter situations, thereby saving lives.

So how is it that four armed cops remained outside the building and did nothing? For that, you have to go to Sundance on Conservative Treehouse, who, beginning with the Trayvon Martin case, has been keeping an eye on the Broward and Miami-Dade County Police Departments, filing FOIA requests and winkling out a major scandal. In sum, these actors, in order to obtain federal grants under Obama and Eric Holder, who conned governments into thinking that disparate outcomes – that is, more arrests and school expulsions of black kids than white kids – were the result of discrimination, did not discriminate regarding conduct issues. Local governments were rewarded with grants if they kept school arrests down, the cover being “let’s stop the pipeline from schools to prisons.” Without arrests, there was no record in background checks to keep violent people from having guns. It’s that simple: no matter what steps you put into place to prevent such things, if the procedure is corrupted, it won’t work. No matter how many armed deputies are at the site, if they are following orders not to intercede, or at least permitted to just stand idly by, they will be useless as protection. And yet the same people who are for disarming law-abiding citizens want to give the very people who are refusing to follow commonsense dictates for our protection more power and us less.

If journalism awards were handed out to those who actually are engaged in journalism, Sundance would be getting one. Here are some of the things he turned up in his hard years long slogging through Broward and Miami-Dade Counties’ police practices and operations.

Broward and Miami-Dade Counties’ law enforcement departments are deeply political. Scot Peterson was, until he resigned, a school resource officer (SRO). Backed by responses to repeated FOIA requests, Sundance concludes:

The roles of SRO’s are political, not law enforcement.

Here’s what people don’t understand. When the county policy is intentionally constructed to ignore criminal behavior in schools, the Sheriff and School superintendent cannot rely on “law and order-minded” SROs to carry out the corrupt policy.

The SRO must carry a political hat and be able to intercept behavior, modify the action based on a specific policy, falsify documents, manipulate records etc, and engage in the system with an understanding of the unwritten goals. SROs are given political instructions, NOT, I repeat, NOT given instructions to uphold laws and regulations.

The School Officers are the primary foot soldiers carrying out political policy. Engaging an active shooter on campus is the furthest thing from their skill-set you could imagine.

Security of school students is just not their role. The Broward County SRO is in place to protect the School System “policy.”

While the press is now reporting the many instances where neighbors and others phoned in warnings to the FBI about the shooter and the many visits (39) by the police to his home about disturbances there, Sundance argues, they didn’t “miss warning signs”; they ignored them as part of school and police department policies.

Sundance details the many times tips about the shooter were given the department and deliberately ignored.

Broward County law enforcement (Sheriff Israel), in conjunction with Broward County School Officials (Superintendent Runcie and School Board), have a standing policy to ignore any criminal engagement with High School students.

When the police are hiding current, actual and ongoing unlawful conduct as a matter of standard procedure on a regular basis, what do we expect the police would do with reports of potential unlawful conduct? Of course they would ignore them.

This is not a “mistake” on their part, the ‘doing nothing’ is part of the standard practice.

♦ Secondly, the 27-minute tape-delay in the CCTV system is not an “accident”, “flaw” or “mistake”. It is entirely by design.

As a standard Broward and Miami-Dade practice, when school law enforcement need to cover-up or hide behavior, they need time (when that behavior happens) to delete the evidence trail. As such, the school policy – as carried out in practice – is more efficient with a 30-minute tape delay affording the school officer enough time to deal with the situation, then erase the possibility of a recording of the unlawful activity surfacing.

Building in a 30-minute delay on the CCTV system was one of those pesky add-on items that happened a few years ago when the School and Law Enforcement officials established the policy of intentionally not arresting students.

With modern technology it’s tough to hide criminal behavior, especially the violent stuff, when it is being recorded. Duh. Ergo the tape-delay was the best-practice workaround.

Why would they do such a thing? Sundance again documents it: money. State and federal funds were given to districts who improved their statistics, so Broward and Miami-Dade Counties hid the crimes, improved their statistics, and got the money. (They did this earlier as well when the “secret discipline and diversionary program” was in place allowing Trayvon Martin to avoid a criminal record.)

The primary problem was the policy conflicted with laws; and over time the policy began to create outcomes where illegal behavior by students was essentially unchecked by law enforcement. …

Initially the police were excusing misdemeanor behaviors. However, it didn’t take long until felonies, even violent felonies (armed robberies, assaults and worse) were being excused.

In time, the situation got so bad that to keep lowering their statistics, they were hiding evidence and failing to recover stolen merchandise because to return it would be to admit that the stuff was the fruit of criminal activity.

Criminal gangs soon realized that the way to avoid arrest was to recruit students to carry out their actions, and they also realized that when the quota for arrests near the end of the month was reached was the best time to get away with crimes.

The system had in a short time become totally corrupted, and the SROs were the “most corrupt.” The local media cooperated in covering it all up, and the cops who wanted to do their jobs were demoralized and deprived of the benefits the corrupt ones got, including free housing close to the schools to which they were assigned.

Indeed, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel used the public funds he got by faking crime statistics and ignoring crimes to hire political supporters for his re-election campaign.

This is the story worth telling, not the scripted anti-gun pap CNN offered up or the ten-minute hate town hall designed to play on your emotions while ignoring the truth. But only one blogger, Sundance, did the work to expose it.

The rest of the MSM seem to be fine with jeopardizing students’ lives, enabling criminals, and using public funds to advance the fortunes of Democrat candidates who allowed this tragedy to occur. As the press in South Florida stinks, do me a favor – pass this one to friends and relatives who live there and who have elected to Congress these avatars of a one-party system: Alcee Hastings, Ted Deutch, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Frederica Wilson.

Eric Holder: We Have to “Brainwash People” & Kids With Anti-Gun Curriculum in Their Classrooms

(Article sent by Lisa Rich in California.)

There is perhaps no greater truth about the radical Left’s indoctrination of public school students on guns than this Eric Holder video clip that has resurfaced.

The former Attorney General — who helped run thousands of illegal guns to Mexico in his “Fast & Furious” scandal which killed Border Agent Brian Terry — simply tells folks during a speech that the Democratic plan to brainwash children about guns in school. (Please click below for the video.)

Wondering Which States Americans Hate to Live In? Ask U-Haul.

by Gary Gindler at American Thinker:

Americans are dynamic people. World statistics on the number of cars per capita show that America is in first place among the “big” countries and inthird place among all countries, behind the dwarfs of San Marino and Monaco.

Where do Americans drive other than to work, shopping, and perhaps to school? Americans move, and move quite often. They relocate to neighboring cities and distant states. By and large, the U.S. looks like a big monolithic country. In fact, the U.S. is a federal republic of independent states, each with many laws, many customs, and a unique political climate.

Does the changing political climate affect population migration between states? Of course, it does, but how? What if we were to express the movement of intra-American migration, not in words, but in the language of numbers? A convenient measure of internal migration could be the U-Haul Index.

U-Haul is a truck rental company used by many Americans who relocate. The rented trucks must be driven by U-Haul customers themselves, and payment is charged one way only. That is, after unloading, it is not necessary to return the vehicle to the starting point. If necessary, the U-Haul company will take care of it. Then the prices for transportation from point A to point B will be the same as from point B to point A, but only if the average number of customers is the same at both points A and B.

If the number of orders for trucks at both destinations is the same, then U-Haul has no problems.

If the number of orders is not the same, then U-Haul must hire drivers to relocate the empty trucks, and then pay to transport these drivers back. In this case, the prices for traffic will not be symmetrical – renting trucks to a popular point A from an unpopular point B will entail higher costs.

Here are some examples (all data is taken from the U-Haul website; prices are for March 1, 2018, for a favorite 20-foot van.)

Renting a truck from New York to Orlando costs $2,214 and back $1,557 (the difference is $657, a 42% surcharge.)

Renting a truck from New York to Dallas costs $2,442 and back $1,962 (the difference is $480, a 24% surcharge.)

Renting a truck from San Francisco to Orlando costs $3,308 and back $1,988 (the difference is $1,510, an 84% surcharge.)

Renting a truck from San Francisco to Dallas costs $3,206 and back $1,128 (the difference is $2,078, a 184% surcharge.)

For comparison, renting the same truck from New York to San Francisco costs $3,409, and back $3,058 (the difference is $351, a surcharge of 11%).

What causes people to leave San Francisco and New York and to make a move to Dallas and Orlando?

San Francisco is in the state of California, and New York City in the state of New York. Both states for decades have been bastions of left-wing politicians – former Democrats, and now socialists and communists.

Dallas is in Texas, and Orlando is in Florida. Both states for decades have been bastions of right-wing politicians – Republicans and conservatives.

Perhaps the question should be posed differently: what forces people to leave those states where the government is pursuing a left socialist policy and move to states where the government is pursuing a pragmatic right-wing policy?

The example above shows that in the move from one corner of the American socialist paradise, San Francisco, to another, New York, a small difference in prices exists. But, most likely, this asymmetry is because the climate in San Francisco is more pleasant than in New York.

Regardless of the political views of those Americans who leave Democrat states for Republican states, Democrat states will be the losers. After all, most American migrants simply repeat the path of many talented people who left the socialist paradise known as the Soviet Union.

Democrats are losing their electorate and therefore are forced to pursue a policy of “open borders.” Moreover, the inclusion of socialism into the capitalist economy leads to severe imbalances that Democrats prefer to compensate by the injection of illegal aliens into the U.S. economy. Democrats see their last hope in the legalization of illegal aliens.

The socialists pursue a single goal: to legalize the participation of illegal aliens in elections. The mayor of New York, communist Bill de Blasio, openly supports the idea that 500,000 illegal aliens residing in New York City should receive the right to vote at least in local elections. The governor of California, socialist Jerry Brown, has already implemented that law. Starting April 1, 2018, all residents of California, including illegal aliens, will automatically be added to voting rolls while renewing their driver’s licenses.

The U-Haul Index shows that Americans categorically do not like such policies. Americans take part in federal elections every two years, but in between elections, they vote, too – with their feet. More precisely, with trucks.